Exchange 2000 Calls for a New Way of Thinking

Sure, Microsoft Exchange may be a great platform for
email. But which platform offers automated workflow solutions,
Web-based collaborative solutions, conferencing solutions,
or even application hosting services? The answer is… Exchange
2000, due in final release before the end of June.

One of our key goals in developing Exchange 2000 has
been to enrich it to make it a true collaboration platform.
Exchange 2000 supports the innovative collaborative solutions
that organizations of any size need to gain maximum business
advantage from their technology infrastructures.

For MCPs in Solution Provider organizations, this means
new opportunities to upgrade your existing customers,
as well as to offer cost-effective solutions for sophisticated
applications—such as videoconferencing—to new customers.
For MCPs in customer organizations, you now have new ways
to support collaboration and workflow among your co-workers,
making your network—and yourself—increasingly strategic
components of your organization.

Exchange 2000 offers various new features and technologies.
For example, Exchange 2000 Conferencing Server makes it
easy for you to offer dedicated servers for “meetings
without walls.” Knowledge workers can participate in,
as well as organize and manage data around, voice and
video conferences across the intranet and Internet. IT
administrators, meanwhile, gain tools to easily administer
the backend with support for bandwidth allocation, load
balancing, and fail-over.

Exchange 2000’s Web Storage System is an ideal place
to host Web-based collaborative applications. You can
use it to manage applications, projects, or entire communities
of shared interest. The Web Store is tightly integrated
with Windows 2000’s Internet Information Server (IIS),
making it an ideal location to host intranet applications.

Exchange 2000 also includes unified messaging, letting
you combine voice mail, email, paging, faxing, and more
into a single user interface. Major third-party providers
like Alcatel, Cisco, Lucent, and Nortel are providing
products and services using this technology, making it
easy for you to integrate it into customer solutions.

The Workflow Designer for Exchange Server, combined with
the Exchange routing objects, gives you the tools you
need to create automated workflow solutions that streamline
and speed processes throughout an organization.

Exchange 2000 makes it easier to communicate anytime,
anywhere. Outlook Web Access keeps customers or co-workers
in touch with their valuable business and personal information
from any Web browser; Exchange 2000 also supports wireless
standards, so knowledge workers can access their information
from wireless PDAs, such as the RIM Blackberry, or from
wireless, Web-enabled cell phones. And it does all this
while bringing scalability and reliability to new levels
with features such as support for multiple databases and
Windows 2000 clustering.

We’ve also made it easier for you to get up to speed
with Exchange 2000. Visit the Exchange site at www.microsoft.com/exchange
for access to white papers, deployment guides, the MSDN
Exchange Developer Center, and the release candidate software
itself. We’re also offering new Microsoft Official Curriculum
(MOC) courses to give you the training and certification
you need to maximize your understanding of Exchange. For
more information on these courses, visit www.microsoft.com/ISAPI/train_cert/catalog/findcrse.asp.
If you still thought Exchange is just for messaging, maybe
it’s time to exchange your point of view.